


A Sequence of Intricacies

by throughtosunrise



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Gen, look I just have a lot of feelings about Beau and Jester's friendship, some hints at one-sided background Beau/Yasha
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-12
Updated: 2018-06-12
Packaged: 2019-05-21 08:04:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14911553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/throughtosunrise/pseuds/throughtosunrise
Summary: Beau's never really had a friend before. Except for the Traveler, Jester hasn't really, either.It's a bit of a learning experience.





	A Sequence of Intricacies

**Author's Note:**

> Yes hello I was awash in feelings about this friendship, even before Marisha stated that re: Jester, Beau was "deeply enjoying having a friend." Then some folks on Discord started talking about Beau and Jester and hair braiding and my feelings turned into a bit of a character study. A character study with some hints at Beau/Yasha because I'm incapable of not at least alluding to it.
> 
> (This was going to be longer, but I kind of like where it ends.)

Beau and Jester share a room on the first night in Trostenwald. It makes sense, none of them having much coin to spare just yet, but Beau figures in another day or two, once they get paid for a job, Jester’s going to want her own space. Everyone does, after all; nobody wants to be saddled with her cranky ass for a roommate longer than strictly necessary.

So they spend hours hauling boxes for the Baumbachs, which admittedly is mostly Jester doing the heavy lifting while Beau and Fjord point her in the right direction and maybe realign a few boxes after they’ve been set down. It’s a day of figuring out what she can say that’ll make Fjord groan with exasperation and laughing behind her hand when he fleeces the warehouse workers for every copper they have, of listening to Jester’s cheerful unending rambling with what starts out as an expectation that she’s going to start getting annoyed by it any second now and ends with a curious sense of amazement that she’s actually really enjoying it.

It’s a long day and they’re all pretty tired by the end of it, so when they get back to the Nestled Nook and Jester doesn’t stop at the bar to ask for another room for herself, well, she and Fjord will probably take off without Beau tomorrow anyway, so what’s one more night?

After they’ve had dinner and taken advantage of the inn’s small washroom to clean up after the dirt and sweat of the day’s work, Beau’s lying on her bed combing through her wet hair with her fingers when Jester comes back in with her horns poking comically through the towel wrapped around her head.

“Oh, wow,” Jester says; she practically skips over to the bed against the other wall of the tiny room and drops down onto it in a cross-legged position. “You look really different with your hair down, Beau.”

Great, here it comes. Beau takes a breath and prepares several different cutting retorts to the inevitable admonishment that she should really consider wearing it down more often, but she’s left flat-footed by the fact that Jester never actually gives her a reason to use them.

“Do you want help with that?” Jester asks instead, and digs into her pack for a hairbrush. “‘cause you probably want to let it dry at least before you put it back up, so we might as well get it all untangled first.”

Beau rolls over onto her side and props her head up on one hand, eyeing Jester warily. “You’re offering to help me brush my hair.”

“Well…” Jester gives her an odd look. “Yeah?”

“Why?”

“Why not?” Jester takes all two of the steps necessary to cross the space from her side of the room and sits down on the edge of Beau’s bed, twirling the hairbrush between her fingers. “Hair’s kind of a pain in the butt to take care of, especially if you have to do it by yourself. So, you know, if you have someone to help you with that, why not? And then you can help me with mine later.”

Beau snorts. “What makes you think I’d be any good at that?”

Jester looks at her with such genuine confusion that Beau wonders what the hell kind of life she must have had before, where the assumption most people would leap to doesn’t even occur to her. “Why wouldn’t you?”

“Because—” Nah. Explaining to Jester how shitty people can be seems like an unnecessarily mean thing to do, and she doesn’t have the heart for it. “Never mind. Sure. I can do that.”

It might actually be kind of fun, she realizes, and pushes herself into an upright position.

Jester brightens. “So you’ll let me, then?” She sounds so eager about it. How the hell can Beau say no to that?

“Yeah.” Beau shakes her head, lets her hair tumble down her back. “Yeah, sure, sure. Let’s do this.”

Jester’s little squeal of delight as she settles herself behind Beau and begins to brush her hair is unexpectedly warming, and Beau can’t help but feel like it’s confirmation that this was the right decision.

“This is so much fun,” Jester says happily; she runs the brush through Beau’s hair a little too quickly, though to her credit she does apologize every time she accidentally pulls too hard on Beau’s hair when the brush catches a snarl. Beau wouldn’t say it’s as much fun for her as it seems to be for Jester, but honestly, she isn’t getting lectured on how messy her hair is, or how much better it would look if she just let it grow back out and wore it down, and that means it’s automatically the most pleasant experience she’s had in her life with letting someone else do this for her.

Yeah, that’s pretty fucking sad, not that she’ll say as much out loud.

Jester’s petting her undercut now, and ordinarily Beau would snarl at anyone taking those kinds of liberties with physical contact, but shit, it’s kind of relaxing. Besides, fuck if she knows why, but she feels more comfortable around this peppy tiefling girl she’s known for all of two days than she probably has around anyone in her life.

“It’s so soft,” Jester enthuses. “That’s pretty cool, Beau. You’re pretty cool.”

A laugh escapes Beau: not her usual sarcastic bark, but a real, honest-to-gods delighted laugh that almost fucking bubbles out of her with so much ease she seriously considers suspecting Jester of using magic to make it happen. “Y’know, usually when girls tell me things like that, their parents make sure they never talk to me again?”

Jester’s hands still in her hair for a moment. “That’s dumb of their parents, then. I don’t think my mom would mind,” she says softly, and there’s a little hitch in her voice after she mentions her mother.

Beau makes a noncommital but thoughtful noise. “Speaking of pretty cool, she sounds like it.”

“Yeah.” Jester sighs and goes to work untangling a particularly bad knot with her fingers. “She really is. You’d like her.”

There’s more there, and Beau wants to know, but she doesn’t want to subject Jester to her usual aggressive style of interrogation either. It doesn’t take a genius to tell that Jester’s lived a sheltered life, and as much as she thinks that’s sad she also kind of — already, which boggles Beau — wants to kick the ass of anyone who’s shitty to her.

“I’ll take your word for it,” she mumbles instead, leaning back on her hands. “But maybe that’d be cool, meeting her someday.”

Jester sighs wistfully. “Yeah. Maybe you’ll get the chance.”

She doesn’t say a damn word about how Beau should try to look or act a little differently at that hypothetical meeting; the absence of a comment to that effect makes the pause after she speaks almost deafening, and Beau smiles, even though Jester can’t see it. “I think I might like that.”

She won’t get her own hopes up. She won’t, but for half a second it’s really, really nice to think about getting introduced to someone’s parent and not getting the judgmental looks and cold reception she’s so used to anticipating, just because fuck you, Dad, you do not get to say ‘I told you so’ this time.

“Oh!” Jester exclaims. “I have an idea. I could put a little braid in it, right about —” She traces a line along Beau’s scalp, maybe an inch or so above the line where her shave begins. “There. What do you think?”

“Sure, why not?” She’s not really sure why she’s so quick to agree; maybe it’s for the very simple reason that Jester asked.

“Oh, good!” The bed shifts as Jester bounces in excitement again. “This is going to be great.”

Beau can feel her separating out several locks of hair, and she can already tell from the slow and uneven motions of Jester’s fingers that she isn’t used to this. “You, uh, do a lot of braiding people’s hair?” she asks lightly, as if she didn’t already have a good guess.

“Oh,” Jester says after a long, telling pause; she undoes a couple of plaits, redoes them, undoes one again. “I mean… sure? Mine, mostly, but sure. Sometimes the Traveler let me do his, but that was only a couple of times.”

“That’s cool,” Beau says. She’s not touching the Traveler thing; she and religion don’t really get along, and she’s not in the mood to pick a fight tonight, by accident or otherwise. “Wasn’t really my thing, personally, but I can be down with it.”

“I like that,” Jester tells her, still undoing almost as much of her work as she accomplishes. “You seem like you’re pretty down with doing a lot of things.”

Beau shrugs. “Well, I mean. Life’s not that long, right? Why blow the opportunity?”

“I never thought about it that way,” Jester admits. “But my mom told me, before I left home, that there would be a lot of pretty uptight people in the world. I’m just really glad you’re not one of them. Like that guy this morning, ugh.”

It takes her a moment to remember what Jester’s talking about, but yeah, Beau remembers the jackass outside the Baumbach brewery who’d muttered something about demons and half-breeds and had probably been coming up with some choice words about her, too, except she hadn’t let him get that far before she’d decked him. Whatever kind of sheltered life Jester had before, if that’s the kind of thing her mother had to warn her about, Beau thinks she might be a little bit envious. It’s a lesson she learned very early on, herself… and now she’s kind of glad she met up with Jester and Fjord on the Amber Road the other day.

This is something she’s going to enjoy while it lasts.

“Eh.” A noncommittal tone works, otherwise people might suspect she actually cares. “That’s most people, right? Boring. Why be boring?”

Jester giggles and tugs a little bit at the braid she’s working on. “I don’t think hanging around with you is going to be boring.”

She makes it sound almost like she hopes it’ll be an ongoing thing, but Beau chooses not to believe that. She’ll take the flattery, though. “You say that now, but wait until I get you into trouble.”

Jester leans around to peer quizzically at her. “So what was fighting a giant snake thing, then?”

Yeah, okay, Jester’s got her there. Beau raises her eyebrows, spreads her hands wide, and shrugs. “A whole shitload of fun? You’ve got all kinds of wild tricks you can pull off, you and Fjord.”

Muffling a snicker behind her hand, Jester grins and turns her attention back to Beau’s hair. “That’s true. It was pretty fucking cool. And you! With the —” She mimes a series of rapid punches. “Bam bam-bam! That was amazing.”

It hadn’t been, really; she’d missed about as many strikes as she’d landed, and half of those hadn’t had quite the impact she’d been going for. Beau can still hear her instructors picking apart her technique whenever she replays that fight in her mind, and even without that she knows she could have done better.

It’s nice to not hear it, though.

“Damn it,” Jester grumbles, and Beau turns to look at her.

“Huh?”

Jester waves a hand at the side of Beau’s head, glaring so hard Beau can almost feel holes getting bored into her skull from the intensity. “It looks like shit, that’s all. I’ll undo it. I’m really sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Beau tells her, but secretly she’s touched by the apology. “It’s practice, right?”

“Sure.” Jester brightens immediately, all traces of annoyance forgotten with an enviable speed. “We can just try again tomorrow, okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, okay.” She won’t take that promise at anything more than face value, but Beau finds herself grinning back at Jester anyway. “Tomorrow.”

 

* * *

 

When they reach Zadash several days later, now with Caleb, Nott, and Molly in tow and a decent haul of coin in their pockets for their part in fighting off the gnoll attack in Alfield, Jester still agrees to share her room at the Leaky Tap with Beau.

They haven’t found an excuse to get rid of her yet, so again, Beau’s not going to argue. It’s better than the single room they had to share in Alfield, and definitely better than getting jumped by bandits in the middle of the night on the road. Molly’s already getting on her last damn nerve and something about Nott really sets her teeth on edge, which Beau could easily use as an excuse of her own to take off, but nah. She’s put up with worse for years; tolerating the obnoxious asshole and the creepy goblin is worth it if she gets to keep hanging out with Jester and Fjord, and maybe, because she never can resist a good mystery, poke a little bit at the enigma that is Caleb.

“Seriously, Jester, a lollipop?”

Beau’s sprawled out on her bed with her head hanging slightly off the edge where she can watch the upside-down figure of Jester doodle in her sketchbook across the room; she’s been turning over the information they learned at the Knights of Requital meeting in her head all night, and she’s over it for now.

“What?” Jester looks up, sticks her tongue out at Beau, and starts scribbling away again. “Do you have something against candy?”

“No, man, I just —” Actually, that giant spectral lollipop strikes her as such an innately Jester choice that whatever protest Beau had about it not being very intimidating unravels immediately. “You know what, nothing. It was perfect. It just wasn’t what I was expecting. That’s all.”

“I know, I know,” Jester says in a light sing-song. “It’s not very badass, but I figured you had that covered pretty well. You were, like, holding off all of them from the doorway! That was the coolest shit ever!”

Beau, once again, can think of a dozen things she could have done differently; it’s been three days since that battle, after all, plenty of time for her to pick apart everything she did, though it’s easier to keep from succumbing to that temptation when she’s got people around her who don’t seem to care if she’s point-for-point perfect. Besides, yeah, it was pretty cool.

She flashes Jester a tiny smile, brief enough that she’s not sure Jester caught it in her rapt attention to whatever it she’s drawing — which, upon seeing several vibrant shades of blue on the page, seems to be her. “We did kick some pretty major ass that night.”

Jester looks over at her and lets a slow, deliberate smirk cross her face over the space of several seconds, then pointedly goes back to her drawing.

“…what?” Beau’s already learned to worry when Jester gets that look on her face. Trickery clerics, man.

“Oh, nothing.”

“Jester. What?”

The breezily innocent voice Jester uses would sound obviously fake coming from anyone else, but she sells it so well. “Just, you know…” She sets the sketchbook aside and flops onto her stomach so she’s facing Beau, her chin propped up on her hands. “You probably think we would have kicked a whole lot more ass if Yasha was here with us.”

Oh. Well.

Beau doesn’t care if people noticed her attraction to Molly’s barbarian friend; she didn’t bother to hide it, and besides, anyone with fucking eyes who doesn’t see how hot Yasha is just doesn’t appreciate the good things in life. She’s less indifferent about gossip — she doesn’t really have time for that shit — but where’s the harm in it, here? They’re not talking about anyone else, and talking with Jester is fun, even if it’s talking about random meaningless shit that Beau doesn’t normally care to talk about.

Okay, that’s kind of a lie. She’s never really had anyone that she can talk about random meaningless shit with just for fun before, which is a totally different thing from trying to tune out of other people’s random meaningless small talk when she doesn’t give a single flying fuck about it.

She’s kind of had enough of super deep meaningful conversations all the time anyway.

So she gives Jester a broad, shit-eating grin and drawls, “Well, yeah. You’ve seen her, right? That big-ass sword and those arms? That’s the walking definition of badass right there.”

“That’s so cute,” Jester says, and Beau blinks at her in surprise, so she clarifies, “You’re so cute, trying to act like you don’t have a crush on her.”

“Who says —”

“Please, it’s totally obvious.” Jester finds her red paint, grabs her sketchbook, and adds a quick hint of a blush to her drawing of Beau. “It’s adorable.”

Beau just stares at her for a moment, feeling oddly pleased; nobody ever calls her adorable, at least not without a healthy dash of sarcasm.

“I get that a lot,” she says instead, and is met with a deadpan look that suggests Jester doesn’t actually buy it for a moment, but she isn’t going to call Beau on that. “But, I mean, she is gorgeous, and those muscles, damn.”

Jester snickers. “You got a pretty good close up view of those.”

To her slight mortification, Beau can feel her facial muscles slackening into a dopey smile. “Oh, yeah. Real solid, too. Shit, maybe I should have paid her that five gold.”

“Mmm. You probably wouldn’t have gotten your money’s worth, ‘cause of stupid zombie things attacking,” Jester points out.

“Oh, right.” It’s funny how easy a conversation like this is with Jester, Beau thinks. And it’s ridiculous, and she doesn’t even mind.

“But you got to watch her in action, for free, so that’s still a win!”

Beau chuckles. “That’s true. I don’t think that was covered in the price of admission. Hey, you want to take another shot at braiding my hair?”

That’s all the cue Jester needs to spring up off her bed and hold a hand out to help Beau into a sitting position before she sits down on the edge of Beau’s bed herself. “I’ll get it right this time, watch!”

Beau could protest, insist she can get up herself just fine, but she lets Jester help her up and lets her hair down so Jester can get to work.

“Yasha said she’d meet us here in Zadash,” she muses. “Wonder if she made it here yet?”

“Who knows?” Jester asks in that sly little sing-song of hers that would make Beau want to punch anyone else. “Why? You’re not going to go looking for her, are you?”

Beau snorts. “Can’t I just wonder? No, I’m not going to go looking for her. She looks like she can take care of herself fine. I’m just curious.”

Jester pauses in her braiding. “I was just teasing, you know,” she says, suddenly uncertain. “I don’t think you’re that type of girl. You’re not mad, are you?”

Beau reaches back, pats Jester lightly on the knee. “Nah. I’m not mad. We’re cool.” She sighs, and — ah, fuck it. “Not gonna lie, I thought about it for, like, a second? But that’s not really my deal.”

“I know,” Jester tells her, tying off the end of the braid, and she’s so utterly sincere and guileless that Beau believes her. It’s really nice to be able to believe someone, and Beau can’t stop the sudden flood of gratitude that rushes in and fills some void in her chest she’d tried to forget was even there. “You know, you guys would look really cute together.”

“How’s it coming along up there?” Instead of agreeing, because thoughts like that only lead to disappointment later and she refuses to let herself think any more than she already has about how damn good she and Yasha would look together, Beau waves her hand in the general direction of the side of her head.

“Pretty good,” Jester says, but with a split-second touch of hesitation. “But I don’t know if it’s good enough.”

Beau turns around and catches Jester by the wrist before she can start to undo the braid again. “Nah, keep it. It’s fine.” She can see her reflection in the mirror across from the foot of her bed, and the braid is in fact uneven and a little bit crooked, but Jester’s gone and woven a thin piece of blue ribbon into it, which is a sweet gesture. “I like it. I’m gonna leave it there.”

Jester’s smile lights up the room, and Beau feels like that’s enough reason right there for her to keep it. Hell, maybe if anyone comments on it she’ll even brag about it.

“Now you look even more badass, Beau.”

“Yeah, thanks for that.” She uncurls her fingers from around Jester’s wrist and punches her very lightly in the shoulder. “We should probably get some sleep, though. We’ve got a lot of shit to do tomorrow.”

“It’s a whole new city to explore, and also we have a lot of shit to sell,” Jester agrees, and jumps to her feet so she can snuff out the candle and crawl into bed. “Night, Beau. See you in the morning.”

Beau waits until the lights are out before she pulls the blanket up over herself and smiles in Jester’s general direction. “Sleep well, roomie.”

A lot of things come down to muscle memory for her, including the way words feel in her mouth when she says them. Those three words are a whole new unfamiliar sequence, and she fumbles through it a bit like a kata she hasn’t learned yet, but… it feels like she could get used to it.

Just needs some practice.


End file.
